RE:Won't be long now!Haywood: Ive always not liked the idea that krill oil will be judged in view of Amarin. Ive never been particularly impressed with Vascepa, which is Amarins drug. Vascepa is stripped out fish oil. It takes fish oil, which is a healthy ingredient, healthy substance, and you strip out half of whats in it. They take out the DHA, and DHA is a very healthy, helpful ingredient. They took it out for reasons that I would call cynical. They took it out because they said, Okay. The drug that works here is [Pfizers (PFE)] Lovaza. And Lovaza is very effective in lowering triglycerides, but it has a flaw. It also raises LDL. So they thought that they could have a marketing advantage over Lovaza if they lowered triglycerides and didnt raise LDL. So they looked at fish oil and said, Well, what does what? DHA, that raises LDL, which it does. And so they pulled that out and theyve got stripped down fish oil EPA. They call it Vascepa and they effectively lower triglycerides without raising LDL. And thats what they did. And the numbers back it up. DHA increases LDL. But look at the studies on average. DHA is also more effective at lowering triglycerides than EPA. Although it does raise LDL, it also raises HDL [good cholesterol]. Its the ratio between LDL and HDL thats important. And its important to understand why. If you look at the functions of LDL and HDL, LDL, which is known as bad cholesterol, is typically involved in the transport of fats in the body, where it gets deposited in arteries and places where you dont want it to be deposited. HDL is good cholesterol. HDL actually has a mechanical function of taking fats out of the body. So even looking at the isolated ingredient of DHA, if it raises HDL as it raises LDL, its probably not that bad for you on that specific basis. So DHA, youre actually better off taking DHA than not taking DHA, but they stripped out the DHA [in Vascepa] in order to have something they could tout as not raising LDL. The nutritional superiority of krill oil, I think, is conferred by two ingredients that are not in fish oil: phospholipids and astaxanthin, which is the very powerful antioxidant thats in krill oil. If you take studies out there that look at the effects of phospholipids on lipid profile (and phospholipids are extremely effective at lowering triglycerides and LDL) and you look at sort of the witchs brew EPA, DHA, phospholipids, and astaxanthin, which is what krill oil contains you have that one ingredient that tends to raise LDL, DHA, which Amarin decided to get rid of. But at the same time you have an abundance of phospholipids which are very effective at lowering LDL. So net-net with krill oil, you get a lowering of LDL and a raising of HDL. And at the same time, you get a very effective lowering of triglycerides. I think an effective way of looking at it is if you look at the single bullet studies: What does EPA do alone? What does DHA do alone? What do phospholipids do alone? What does astaxanthin do alone? If you are going to rank those four ingredients in descending order of effectiveness at lowering triglycerides, you would start with phospholipids number one most effective; number two DHA; number three EPA; and number four astaxanthin (astaxanthin actually would be on the list because theres a study or two that you can find that where it has an effect of lowering triglycerides). So to me, common sense kind of says: if youve got a drug that consists entirely of number three on the list of effectiveness at lowering triglycerides, and Ive got a combination of the most effective, the second most effective, the third most effective, I just want to take a wild guess and say, My drugs are going to work better, or my ingredient is going to work better because Ive got number one, two, and three and all youve got is number three. And early work, sort of preliminary results, seem to back up that thesis.